Key Phrases

The Internet is changing the automotive industry as the traditional manufacturer and dealer structure faces increased threats from third party e-tailers. Dynamic pricing together with the Direct-to-Customer business model can be used by manufacturers to respond to these challenges. Indeed, by coordinating production and inventory decisions with dynamic… (More)

A growing number of manufacturing industries are initiating efforts to address sustainability issues. A study by the National Association of Manufacturers indicated that the manufacturing sector currently accounts for over a third of all energy consumed in the United States. There are many areas and opportunities to reduce energy costs and pollution… (More)

Reduction of energy consumption is important for reaching a sustainable future. This paper presents a novel method for optimizing the energy consumption of robotic manufacturing systems. The method embeds detailed evaluations of robots' energy consumptions into a scheduling model of the overall system. The energy consumption for each operation is modeled… (More)

Control of production operations is considered as one of the most economical methods to improve energy efficiency in manufacturing systems. This paper investigates energy consumption reduction in production systems through effective scheduling of machine startup and shutdown. Specifically, we consider serial production lines with finite buffers and machines… (More)

In closed production lines, each part is placed on a carrier at the input of the first machine and is removed from the carrier at the output of the last machine. The first machine is starved if no carriers are available, and the last machine is blocked if the empty carrier buffer is full. The number of carriers in the system is <i>S</i> and the capacity of… (More)

This paper describes the design and implementation of a continuous improvement project at an automotive paint shop. The development is based on a recently developed improvement methodology for production systems with quality-quantity coupled operations, whereby increasing the probability to complete a job during a cycle time leads to decreasing job quality.… (More)

Conventionally, improving production efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness has been the primary research focus of production management, while energy consumption has received relatively little attention. Energy consumption plays a more and more important role in the manufacturing environment. This is mainly driven by energy cost and environmental… (More)

Since the 1980s, the manufacturing environment has seen the introduction of numerous sensor/actuator bus and network protocols for automation systems, which led to increased manufacturing productivity, improved inter-changeability of devices from different vendors, facilitated flexibility and reconfigurability for various applications and improved… (More)

The bottleneck (BN) of a production system is a machine with the strongest effect on the system's throughput. In this paper, a method for BN identification in serial lines with rework and Bernoulli machines is developed. The method can be applied using either calculated or measured data on blockages and starvations of the machines. For the case of… (More)